During the 1960s, grocery stores and gas stations handed out free game cards covered with a waxy coating that hid a possible prize. The prizes tended to be small, often worth only a penny. There were also free cards that could be compared to supermarket ads in newspapers in a manner similar to the game Bingo: If a card matched the graphic symbols in print, the consumer could win food, money, or prizes. These simple participant games evolved into what today is now referred to as instant win games, where a participant can potentially win a large sum of money playing a game of chance.
The first secure instant lottery ticket was developed in 1974 by scientist John Koza and retail promotions specialist Daniel Bower. Koza and Bower were the cofounders of Scientific Games in Las Vegas, Nev. This was the beginning of the instant lottery concept. When secure instant lottery tickets debuted in May 1974, players in Massachusetts had been buying roughly $1,000,000 worth of six-digit lotto drawing tickets every week. By the end of the first seven days of marketing instant-win cards, the state had sold $2,700,000 worth of them.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,174,857 (Koza), issued Nov. 20, 1979, provides evidence of a game ticket particularly useful as an instant win ticket. The ticket comprises at least a base sheet and a cover sheet which are adhesively joined together in a peripheral portion. Information to be concealed is placed on the surface of the base sheet which faces the cover sheet. This information is concealed by covering it with a suitable, removable material which is opaque, thus concealing the information until the opaque material is removed.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,376 (Goldman et al), issued Mar. 4, 1980, provides for an instant lottery ticket imprinted with lottery numbers and serial numbers that are uniquely related. Lottery numbers are covered from view until after purchase. This provides for control and distribution of winners with a high degree of security. Computerized fabrication allows for high security and low-cost production.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,299,637 (Oberdeck et al), issued Nov. 10, 1981, discloses a method for making a game ticket which has a base sheet adhesively joined together in peripheral portions of sections containing information used in the game. An opaque material is applied over the release coating to conceal information in the printed areas. The opaque material is adapted to be rubbed off when the ticket is used.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,643,454 (Ondis), issued Feb. 17, 1987 and assigned to Astro-Med Inc., provides an instant game type lottery ticket having a coating on the front side which includes a first metallic layer and an outwardly facing layer of thermally responsive chemicals, a removable opaque layer over at least a portion of the thermally responsive chemical layer, and a second metallic layer on the back side of the ticket. The metallic layers include vacuum deposited silver-colored metallized layers having protective transparent plastic films thereon. Game-playing indicia can be imprinted on the lottery ticket at the point of sale without damaging the removable opaque layer by selectively activating the thermally responsive chemicals under the removable opaque layer with a thermal printhead. The transparent plastic films allow the ticket to be thermally imprinted with a thermal printhead without damaging the printhead and the metallized layers adding opacity to the lottery ticket.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,579,693 (Bennett), issued Nov. 12, 2013, discloses a system and method for providing an additional or end of game drawing to players of a lottery game. A player participates in a lottery and subsequently submits a validation code from his ticket to a lottery ticket provider. The lottery ticket provider then applies an algorithm to the validation code to determine if the player is entered into a secondary game or end of game drawing.
Approximately 43 US states and territories currently offer a lottery with a scratch off ticket available for purchase. Scratch off tickets significantly increase lottery revenue when they are utilized. A limitation to existing scratch off ticket games is that when the grand prizes associated with a specific game or series of tickets are exhausted the sales of the remaining tickets of that specific game are terminated. With increasing grand prize amounts and quantities awarded, the Lottery risks a deficit or a significant revenue shortfall if all of the grand prizes are awarded before a “critical point” in sales has occurred.
As an example, consider a scratch off lottery game with the following specifications:
1) A print run 5,400,000 divided into 50 pools and 360,000 rolls of tickets.
2) Each pool contains 108,000 tickets divided across 7200 rolls with 15 tickets per roll.
3) Each ticket costs $20.00.
4) Five grand prize-winning tickets seeded uniformly and randomly across the 50 pools amount of $1,000,000 each.
The Grand Prize tickets “seeded” across the ticket print run should allow the game to operate for an acceptable length of time. The game rules require the game to terminate when all five grand prize tickets are claimed. Using the Grand Prize seeding methods, the probability of all five grand prize tickets being won early, while low, is still possible and will result in the game being terminated “early” before ticket sales have generated sufficient revenue, leading to poor monetary performance.
As such, there is a need for a system and method to extend the playtime of an instant win scratch off ticket game.